Ancient Animal Eggs Found

Six hundred million years ago the eggs of what was probably a tubular coral drifted to the bottom of a shallow sea and were covered with a coating of phosphorous that preserved the embryos in exquisite detail.

The fossilized eggs are three-dimensional and show the first stages of development of one of Earth's earliest animals.

"The cellular preservation is amazing," Shuhai Xiao, assistant professor of Geobiology at Virginia Tech said, explaining that the fossils showed the eggs in development from a single cell to a few dozen cells.

The parents of the eggs, scientists believe, are coral-like animal also preserved in the phosphorites in South China. Researchers observed that embryos beginning to hatch had three coiled spirals that were just beginning to unfurl.

"They look as if they can unwind to a tube structure," Xiao said, "We are looking for more evidence, but if that is true, it might link the embryo fossils to the tubular coral-like animal."

Professor Xiao is reporting the findings on the parental lineage of the embryos at the Geological Society of America Meeting in Denver this week.

-- Sarah Davidson

Credit: Shuhai Xiao, Virginia Tech